[from Mary Powers (971202)]
Wearing my treasurer's hat, I want to thank everyone who paid memberships
either in their conference fees or by sending me $20 (or $5 as students).
Special thanks to those who sent a bit extra, either as gifts or as catch-up
for a missed year (or two). Not too late to send dues for
'97.
To Hank Folson and Fred Nickols:
Hank, your posts on complexity not being the real issue and on the
difference between thinking of organisms as being control systems vs. merely
including them were very nicely put.
However, I think both you and Fred have derailed in your recent discussion.
FN: 1) When you say behaviors are "chosen, is that chosen as selected from a
repertoire of possible behaviors, presumably for the purpose of conscious
execution with some outcome in mind?
HF: That sounds reasonable for recurring situations where we can remember
the general control outputs that worked before and use one of them as the
starting point.
MP: One of the principles of PCT is that we do not sense outputs - the
cascade of higher level outputs setting lower level reference levels down
through the hierarchy. The only outputs we sense are those we perceive.
What we remember are perceptions. We may remember perceiving a sequence of
movements that we want to reproduce, or the perceived amount of effort a
particular act required, but simply reproducing what we did before will
NEVER work -
CANNOT work, because initiating a movement is unlikely to start from exactly
the same position as before, and therefore requires different effort, and
doing it with one's muscle fibers in exactly the same condition and
configuration of fatigue and recovery is utterly, totally, unlikely. This
is the eye of the needle, so to speak, that all theories of behavior have to
go through - have to explain - and that most ignore. It is the core of the
concept that behavior must be the control of perception. It is not behavior
that is chosen, it is perception.
FN: Or does chosen refer to some more basic, less conscious act or process?
HF: That sounds reasonable too. I do not know how we make our initial
decision to try a specific output to attempt to return a variable to its
reference level...
MP: This is really a ninth level strategy-planning matter. At this level one
can imagine (perceive) acting in various ways and imagine the perceived
consequences. Setting reference signals for the lower levels and ultimately
the muscles that carry out the strategy chosen all involve unconscious
processes, and one is not likely to be conscious either of the perceptions
at lower levels involved in bringing the chosen strategy to the desired state.
FN: Are behaviors themselves perceived in light of some reference signal and
varied so as to be consistent with that reference signal?
HF: Humans for sure have a complex enough hierarchy to do it this way. I
doubt that E. coli could do it this way. I would think this approach would
be useful, and the most efficient option as a starting point for outputs
only for routine repetitive actions.
FN: Or do we simply vary our behavior so as to reduce the discrepancy
between some non-behavioral variable and its reference condition?
MP: For the most part, it's the _consequences_ of behavior that one has a
perception of and a reference signal for, and the behavioral means is
unimportant. Sometimes, however, the desired consequence is the behavior
itself, as perceived and as wanted - performing a particular sequence of
steps in a dance, or doing a swimming kick properly, etc., etc. But what
you control is still the perceived consequence of behavior, not the behavior
itself, about which you know nothing except what you can perceive.
A repetitive action is a controlled sequence of events: hammering, beating
a drum. The relevant perception is controlled - doing "the same thing" over
and over, plus, in the case of the hammer, stopping when the nail is in, or,
in the case of the drum, maintaining a steady, even beat. However steady
the beat, you still aren't "doing the same thing" each time - different
neurons are firing, different muscle fibers are involved, for each stroke.
This doesn;t mean the beat isn't really steady - it is, as steady as you can
perceive it. You are accomplishing consistent ends by variable means.
'Nuff said,
Mary P.